Although music is known to be a part of everyday life and a resource for mood and emotion management, everyday life has changed significantly for many due to the global coronavirus pandemic, making the role of music in everyday life less certain. An online survey in which participants responded to Likert scale questions as well as providing free text responses was used to explore how participants were engaging with music during the first wave of the pandemic, whether and how they (...) were using music for mood regulation, and how their engagement with music related to their experiences of worry and anxiety resulting from the pandemic. Results indicated that, for the majority of participants, while many felt their use of music had changed since the beginning of the pandemic, the amount of their music listening behaviors were either unaffected by the pandemic or increased. This was especially true of listening to self-selected music and watching live streamed concerts. Analysis revealed correlations between participants’ use of mood for music regulation, their musical engagement, and their levels of anxiety and worry. A small number of participants described having negative emotional responses to music, the majority of whom also reported severe levels of anxiety. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how surveillance facilitates new power relationships.Design/methodology/approachThis longitudinal qualitative study is predicated on observations of the home care workers interacting with their managers and clients. The emerging picture was complemented with interviews of the participants. The home care workers were chosen as being crucial in the construction of new everyday relationships, and their interpretations were given most value in presenting how surveillance and monitoring relationships are constructed as embedded mundane practices and as emerging (...) from practical needs.FindingsThe paper discusses an implementation and use case of surveillance capable technology in a social home care setting. The findings suggest discrepancy of how surveillance is being interpreted by different participants depending on their positioning in the context of use.Originality/valueThe study presents a case study where surveillance issues emerge not only at the workplace but also in the domestic sphere. The paper explores the workers' role in defining surveillance at the workplace, and questions the limits of legitimate surveillance in the social care context concerning vulnerable citizens as clients. (shrink)

Prior to the extensive reform of the Finnish criminal procedure in 1997, the roles of the prosecutor and the defence attorney were passive compared to the role of the judge. The main task of the prosecutor was to read the written indictment and to help the judge to find the truth. The judge could procure evidence ex officio, although it may have been detrimental to the suspect. The roles of the judge, the attorneys and the prosecutor changed dramatically when the (...) reform concerning criminal matters was enacted. The prosecutor is now an active party to the case, ensuring the implementation of criminal liability and actively promoting the progress of the proceedings. It is the duty of the prosecutor to prove the charge by procuring sufficient evidence in support of the charge and by presenting it to the court. The court itself is neutral; it does not support or assist the prosecutor. The judge cannot hear a witness ex officio if the hearing is to be detrimental to the suspect. (shrink)

Foucauldian analyses of civil society depart from classical approaches in that they don´t consider civil society to be a site of societal change or resistance as classical analyses do, but rather one of society’s multiple locations where so-called governmentality hits the ground. Although Foucauldian investigations have provided the prevailing discussion with a necessary departure from excessively idealistic images of civil society organizations as sites of resistance and societal transformation, what may have resulted in turn are overly pessimistic analyses that have (...) overlooked the emancipatory aspects of civil society organizations as sites where Foucauldian “care of the self” becomes possible. This article provides the reader with an analysis of these kind of aspects in civil society organizations’ work and, more importantly, of the conditions of their existence. The study contributes to the prevailing discussion by offering examples of the possibilities that civil society organizations have to act as a counterbalance and addition to states institutions. The context is Finnish drug treatment policies that took a client-centered and user-friendly approach at the turn of 21st century. Since then new kinds of methods to work with drug users have been initiated, which have helped the users to recast their identities and find new ways of living as a drug user. (shrink)

Organisational planning processes often materialise as a series of meetings, where the future of the organisation is jointly discussed and negotiated as a part of local decision-making sequences. Using conversation and discourse analytical approaches, this article investigates how proposals concerning the future can also be resisted by employing a specific device, a conditional construction. The data for the study originate from a city organisation, whose customer services are being developed. The results show how the conditional constructions work in two interrelated (...) ways. First, by introducing a problematic hypothetical situation, they outline the undesirable consequences of the proposed idea in real work life. Second, by highlighting the experience of the customer, they present the organisation as benefitting from the potential rejection of the idea. The article discusses the implications of the results for the study of proposal and decision-making sequences in longitudinal, multisemiotic discursive processes. (shrink)

We found that pension funds may face a bottleneck as practical impediments to engaging in responsible investment with respect to the role played by defining and implementing responsible investment. Furthermore, pension funds seek additional coherence and practical guidelines in this field to enable them to take into account ethical considerations in their investment strategies and in implementing them. These findings indicate that the availability of information may affect the stance that key decision makers of pension funds adopt towards responsible investment.

This study is an investigation of the predictors of young people's interest in environmental political action. Data were collected by means of a survey of young people (ages 15-30) living in Finland (N = 512). The results supported the Environmental Political Action Interest Model (EPAIM) proposed in this study and show that post-materialist values and political competence increased interest in environmental political action. In addition, trust in political parties and nongovernmental organisations was indirectly associated with interest in environmental political action. (...) The results suggest how political authorities might develop policies to encourage young people's participation in environmental politics. (shrink)

This paper explores the dynamic potential inherent in stable looking technological systems. I follow a small Finnish heating business and describe how alternative production practices were established within Finnish forestry. The case shows an interesting development in a sector where local activities have traditionally been coordinated through standardised practices and the physical structure of the forest. My focus is on micro-level shifts of power and I analyse the changing position of local actors in the margins of conventional forestry to understand (...) the fragile nature of the forestry standards. They not only stabilise forestry practices but enable complex interactions and new combinations of actors. Therefore, they also increase the degrees of freedom. My analysis draws from theoretical perspectives of technology studies, actor-network theory and recent discussions in geography on the spatial distribution of power. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOver recent years, an increasing body of research in social and cultural studies has investigated the contemporary processes of social change from the point of view of affective capitalism....

This article adds to critiques of discourses and practices of care that are enmeshed with coloniality. It does so via examining the prominent model of helping marginalized people through giving them the opportunity to care for themselves and their own by being recruited into paid (care) work, thus, becoming “useful” participants in society. This usefulness is read as a colonial project of subordinate inclusion into neoliberal racial capitalism. A perverse ideology of care is mobilized to extract surplus value from marginalized (...) workers “integrated” into the lower echelons of social reproduction. Using historic and contemporary examples, the argument is developed in three steps: First, I discuss how care workers are included via subordination. Second, I analyze how an inversion of care receiver and caregiver transforms marginalized care workers into recipients of integration measures, rendering their care work invisible. Third, I show how racial usefulness, the interpellation that racialized workers be/come “useful,” is undergirded by productivism within neoliberal racial capitalism. (shrink)

In this article, I propose to look at the organisation of reproductive labour in the ‘global North’ through a lens of epistemic ignorance. Focusing on the process of outsourcing, I argue that it creates forms of irresponsibility, and with it, epistemic ignorance. The devaluation of domestic work and the degradation of domestic workers is shaped by gendered and colonial ideologies, and Western epistemologies. These epistemologies underpin a strong subject/object split and buffer the denial of existing interdependencies. I problematise those epistemologies (...) by drawing on feminist care ethics, accounts of relational selves and relational responsibility, and alternative epistemologies. Grounding that discussion on vignettes from an in-depth study of heterosexual couples in Austrian households who outsource domestic work, I argue that the systematic failure to see what and who we are connected to in the domestic realm is shaped by gendered and racialised privilege, and driven by an epistemology of separation. My argument will unfold in two steps. First, I use the concept of the skin as an example of how the beliefs in an independent, autonomous self and a strong subject/object split disguise connectedness and relationality. This leads me to the second step, in which I explicate my notion of semipermeable membranes – a thinking together of ontological permeability and ethical responsiveness. I argue that active forms of ‘unknowing’ at work in ‘mundane,’ everyday, domestic performances have far-reaching consequences. (shrink)

This empirical study examines how practitioners from the organizational functions of human resources, occupational safety and occupational health services within a Finnish industrial organization view the challenges that production supervisors face in their daily work. The article presents a formative intervention, which focuses on supervisors’ changing work and how these organizational support functions could collaboratively serve supervisors better, especially in their task of promoting well-being at work. The article approaches this collective learning effort from the framework of the Cultural Historical (...) Activity Theory , by examining how crossfunctional collaboration evolves and the transitions through which it develops in an intervention process. The development of collaboration is analysed through a process of collective concept and tool formation by following a cross-meeting trajectory of specific annual clock episodes. An annual clock, a co-ordinating tool used in organizations to assist the yearly planning and management of specific operations, emerged in the intervention as the practitioners’ attempt to synchronize overlapping and inconsistent well-being related practices assigned to supervisors. The article presents a framework that can be applied in this kind of combined empirical analysis of tool development and the evolving collaboration. The analysis shows how the idea of the annual clock grew through multifaceted conceptualizations, in which it first had the status of a conceptual object, then a collaborative tool, and eventually a script for becoming a novel cross-functional practice. Simultaneously, the mode of interaction expanded from a function-based co-ordination to task-oriented co-operation, and finally to communication. (shrink)

We investigate what drives responsible investment of European pension funds. Pension funds are institutional investors who assure the income of part of the population for a long period of time. Increasingly, stakeholders hold pension funds accountable for the non-financial consequences of their investments and many funds have engaged in responsible investing. However, it appears that there is a wide difference between pension funds in this respect. We investigate what determines pension funds’ responsible investments on the basis of a survey of (...) more than 250 pension funds in 15 European countries in 2010. We use multinomial logistic regression and find that especially legal origin of the country, ownership of the pension fund and fund size-related variables are to be associated with pension funds′ responsible investment. For fund size, we establish a curvilinear relationship; especially the smallest and largest pension funds in the sample tend to engage with responsible investing. (shrink)

The article examines the Finnish branch of Chabad Lubavitch as a fundamentalist and charismatic movement that differs from other branches of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in its approaches to outreach to non-observant Jews. Whilst introducing the history of Chabad Lubavitch in Finland and drawing on historical and archival sources, the authors locate the movement in a contemporary context and draw on 101 semi-structured qualitative interviews of members of the Finnish Jewish communities, who either directly or indirectly have been in contact with representatives (...) of Chabad Finland. The material is examined through the theoretical concept of ‘vicarious religion’. As the results of the article show, whilst Chabad very much adheres to certain fundamentalist approaches in Jewish religious practice, in Finland they follow a somewhat different approach. They strongly rely on people’s sense of Jewish identification and Jewish identity. Individuals in the community ‘consume’ Chabad’s activities vicariously, ‘belong without believing’ or ‘believe in belonging’ but do not feel the need to apply stricter religious observance. Whilst many of them are critical of Chabad and their activities, they do acknowledge that Chabad fills the ‘gaps’ in and outside the Jewish Community of Helsinki, predominantly by creating new activities for some of its members. (shrink)

This collection of articles from both distinguished and emerging authors working at the intersections of philosophy, literary theory, media, and technology does not intend to fix new moral rules. Instead, the volume explores the ethos of digital environments, asking how we can orient ourselves in them and inviting us to renewed moral reflection in the face of dilemmas they entail.

Citizens are called upon to become active participants in creating a more sustainable food system. As food citizens, people participate in defining and constructing their food systems according to their needs and values. In food policies, the concept of food citizenship is often left undefined or with reference only to individual activities. In the food citizenship literature, the role of nonhuman agency in constituting food citizenship needs more examination. Here we investigate food citizenship activities in a citizen-led community-supported agriculture group (...) and explore the role of materiality in constituting food citizenship. We ask (1) what is the role of material-discursive arrangements in community-supported agriculture activities, and (2) how does materiality constitute food citizenship? We analyze semi-structured interviews, as well as observation and visual material, using qualitative content analysis. Our findings indicate that materialities, such as the field, time, and body, play a central role in community-supported agriculture activities. With materialities, food citizenship is understood as collective and active doing, aiming to change the food system. Instead of endorsing food citizenship as a human trait or status, we claim that it is more productive to regard it as a phenomenon, produced in intra-action with(in) material-discursive arrangements. Acknowledging nonhuman agency emphasizes the political, collective, and responsible nature of citizenship as well as the power relations behind the constitution of citizenship. We conclude that in food policies more attention should be paid to collective ways of civic participation and to the materiality of becoming a food citizen. (shrink)

In this study, we try to establish what determines the substantial differences in the Nordic countries’ size and composition of socially responsible investing (SRI). We investigate if these differences between Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden can be associated with key characteristics in economics, finance, culture, and institutions. We find that in particular economic openness, the size of the pension industry, and cultural values of masculinity (femininity) and uncertainty avoidance can be associated with the differences in SRI in the four countries. (...) On basis of these findings, we lay foundations for an international theory of SRI. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to examine whether companies engaging in corporate philanthropy, a component of corporate social responsibility, disclose information about such activities publicly on their websites, analyze whether there is a relation between the kind of charitable giving, the number of donation types, or the industry sector the company belongs to, the mention on the company website and whether there is a relation between communicate company corporate philanthropy and communicate other company CSR issues. Design/methodology/approach The research methodology was descriptive (...) statistics research method. The data were collected during the months of June and July 2013 from the websites of 141 companies that had recently engaged in corporate philanthropy. Findings The study found that, surprisingly, a considerable portion of companies practicing corporate philanthropy do not disclose that information on their websites. This was especially the case when donations were made with product instead of in cash. Originality/value This study quantifies the fact that many companies engage in CSR through corporate philanthropy but do not communicate those activities to a wider public. This can be seen as a missed opportunity to take advantage of a variety of positive effects that companies related to CSR benefit from. On the other hand, it can also be interpreted as a missed opportunity for the NGOs to encourage their donors to “come out” with their philanthropic activities. (shrink)

This article provides the first historiographical analysis of the origins of Jewish Orthodoxy in Helsinki and describes the development of the rabbinate from the establishment of the congregation in the late 1850s up to the early 1980s. The origins of the Finnish Jewish community lies in the nineteenth-century Russian army. The majority of Jewish soldiers in Helsinki originated from the realm of Lithuanian Jewish culture, that is, mainly non-Hasidic Jewish Orthodoxy that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Initially, the Finnish (...) Jewish religious establishment continued this Orthodox-Litvak tradition. After the independence of Finland, the Helsinki congregation hired academic, Modern Orthodox rabbis educated in Western Europe. Following the devastation of the Shoah and the Second World War, the recruitment of rabbis faced new challenges. Overall, the rabbi recruitments were in congruence with the social and cultural development of the Helsinki community, yet respected its Orthodox roots. (shrink)

This article discusses multisensorial aesthetic experience of environmental materiality via a craft process. The locally situated study investigates the interrelations of humans and environment through soil. In focus is how craft practitioners use their material sensitivity to reflect the idea of interdependency in the context of the contemporary environmental discourse. This is done through presenting an artistic research project in which craft is used to explore the human imprint in a particular geological environment, the Venice Lagoon. The case study Traces (...) from the Anthropocene: Working with Soil combines environmental research methods of contaminated soil and artistic research in the field of ceramic art. Craft making provides an embodied way to engage with the local environment. The cultural value and environmental disruption of the lagoon area forms a context for reflecting the aesthetic experience to better understand how we are active participants, in continuous flux with our material environment. (shrink)

The article examines the role of discourse in organisational sensemaking. By building links between the theorising undertaken within organisational studies and the empirical analysis of multimodal social interaction, it argues for a relational view of sensemaking and investigates how sense is made in and through social interaction in real organisational situations where language use intertwines with embodied actions and the manipulation of artefacts. In particular, the article studies the use of discourse technologies of textual artefacts in sensemaking processes. The data (...) come from training workshops of a Finnish workplace organisation, conducted in order for the employees to delineate the history and future of their organisation with the help of writable papers. The results show how the papers exert agency in the situation by facilitating three specific discursive practices and by enabling and restricting the actions employed in constructing a shared understanding of the organisational reality. (shrink)

This paper analyses the political discourse of Finnish national parks from a perspective of values and justice. By examining the historical and contemporary political processes for establishing parks, we study the definitions of social justice and values attached to nature. An examination of conservation discourse illustrates how the meaning of national parks has changed. Parks are no longer perceived as threats to economic activity; on the contrary, at present parks are considered to benefit the tourism industry. We also argue that (...) a precondition for a socially sustainable solution to political conflict is the definition of minimum rights accepted by all interest groups. (shrink)

Clinical ethics support services are experiencing a phase of flourishing and of growing recognition. At the same time, however, the expectations regarding the acceptance and the integration of traditional CES services into clinical processes are not met. Ethics rounds as an additional instrument or as an alternative to traditional clinical ethics support strategies might have the potential to address both deficits. By implementing ethics rounds, we were able to better address the needs of the clinical sections and to develop a (...) more comprehensive account of ethics quality in our hospital, which covers the level of decisions and actions, and also the level of systems and processes and aspects of ethical leadership. (shrink)

It has been suggested that early cry parameters are connected to later cognitive abilities. The present study is the first to investigate whether the acoustic features of infant cry are associated with cognitive development already during the first year, as measured by oculomotor orienting and attention disengagement. Cry sounds for acoustic analyses (fundamental frequency; F0) were recorded in two neonatal cohorts at the age of 0-8 days (Tampere, Finland) or at 6 weeks (Cape Town, South Africa). Eye tracking was used (...) to measure oculomotor orienting to peripheral visual stimuli and attention disengagement from central stimuli at 8 months (Tampere) or at 6 months (Cape Town) of age. Only a marginal positive correlation between fundamental frequency of cry (F0) and visual attention disengagement was observed in the Tampere cohort, but not in the Cape Town cohort. This correlation indicated that infants from the Tampere cohort with a higher neonatal F0 were marginally slower to shift their gaze away from the central stimulus to the peripheral stimulus. No associations between F0 and oculomotor orienting were observed in either cohort. We discuss possible factors influencing the current pattern of results suggesting a lack of replicable associations between neonatal cry and visual attention and suggest directions for future research investigating the potential of early cry analysis in predicting later cognitive development. (shrink)

The authors examine the claim that the most recent cohort of U.S. women is reluctant to identify as feminist although it has egalitarian gender attitudes. Using two national surveys, they show that the most recent generation is no less likely than prior cohorts to identify as feminist. However, Baby Bust women are less apt to identify as feminist than are older women, once background characteristics and attitudes related to feminist identification are controlled. Analyses suggest this reluctance is not due to (...) an aversion to feminism but reflects the “off” timing of the feminist movement in the lives of Baby Bust women. The authors also find important differences among cohorts in the correlates of feminist identity. Most notably, the relationships of political ideology and gender attitudes to feminist identity are stronger among Baby Boom women, who came of age during the feminist movement’s second wave, than among older and younger women. (shrink)

Determining optimal units of representing morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon is a central question in psycholinguistics. Here, we utilize advances in computational sciences to study human morphological processing using statistical models of morphology, particularly the unsupervised Morfessor model that works on the principle of optimization. The aim was to see what kind of model structure corresponds best to human word recognition costs for multimorphemic Finnish nouns: a model incorporating units resembling linguistically defined morphemes, a whole-word model, or a (...) model that seeks for an optimal balance between these two extremes. Our results showed that human word recognition was predicted best by a combination of two models: a model that decomposes words at some morpheme boundaries while keeping others unsegmented and a whole-word model. The results support dual-route models that assume that both decomposed and full-form representations are utilized to optimally process complex words within the mental lexicon. (shrink)

The unpredictability of maternal sensory signals in caregiving behavior has been recently found to be linked with infant neurodevelopment. The research area is new, and very little is yet known, how maternal anxiety and depressive symptoms and specific parental characteristics relate to the unpredictable maternal care. The aims of the current study were to explore how pre- and postnatal maternal anxiety and depressive symptoms and self-regulation capacity associate with the unpredictability of maternal sensory signals. The study population consisted of 177 (...) mother-infant dyads. The unpredictability of the maternal sensory signals was explored from the video-recorded mother-infant free play situation when the infant was 8 months of age. Pre- and postnatal anxiety and depressive symptoms were measured by questionnaires prenatally at gwks 14, 24, 34, and 3 and 6 months postpartum. Maternal self-regulation capacity, a trait considered to be stable in adulthood, was assessed using adult temperament questionnaire when the infant was 12 months of age. We found that elevated prenatal maternal anxiety symptoms associated with higher unpredictability in the maternal care while depressive symptoms were unrelated to the unpredictability of maternal care. Moreover, the association was moderated by maternal self-regulation capacity, as higher anxiety symptoms during pre-and postnatal period were associated more unpredictability among the mothers with low self-regulation capacity. The combination of higher amount of maternal anxiety symptoms and lower self-regulation capacity seems to constitute specific risk for the unpredictable maternal care. (shrink)

Both patterns of maternal sensory signals and sensitive care have shown to be crucial elements shaping child development. However, research concerning these aspects of maternal care has focused mainly on maternal sensitivity with fewer studies evaluating the impact of patterns of maternal behaviors and changes in these indices across infancy and childhood. The aims of this study were to explore how maternal unpredictability of sensory signals and sensitivity develop and associate with each other from infancy to toddlerhood and whether elevated (...) maternal depressive and anxiety symptoms relate to maternal unpredictable signals and sensitivity in toddlerhood. The study population consisted of 356 mother–child dyads assessed at 30 months; a subset of 103 mother–child dyads additionally participated in 8 months assessment. Maternal unpredictability and sensitivity were assessed from video-recorded free-play episodes at 8 and 30 months. Maternal depressive and anxiety symptoms were assessed with questionnaires at gestational weeks 14, 24, 34 and 3, 6, 12, and 24 months. Mean level of mothers’ unpredictability decreased on average whereas sensitivity did not change between infancy and toddlerhood. Both maternal unpredictability and sensitivity showed moderate level of individual stability from infancy to toddlerhood and these two measures were modestly correlated within each age. Elevated maternal depressive and anxiety symptoms were not related to unpredictability but related to lower maternal sensitivity in toddlerhood. These results identify unpredictable sensory signals as a characteristic of parental care that is independent of standard quality measures and suggest that it may be less influenced by maternal depressive and anxiety symptoms. (shrink)

Sensitivity to others’ emotional signals is an important factor for social interaction. While many studies of emotional reactivity focus on facial emotional expressions, signals such as pupil dilation which can indicate arousal, may also affect observers. For example, observers’ pupils dilate when viewing someone with dilated pupils, so-called pupillary contagion. Yet it is unclear how pupil size and emotional expression interact as signals. Further, examining individual differences in emotional reactivity to others can shed light on its mechanisms and potential outcomes. (...) In the current study, adults’ (N = 453) pupil size was assessed while they viewed images of the eye region of individuals varying in emotional expression (neutral, happy, sad, fearful, angry) and pupil size (large, medium, small). Participants showed pupillary contagion regardless of the emotional expression. Individual differences in demographics (gender, age, socioeconomic status) and psychosocial factors (anxiety, depression, sleep problems) were also examined, yet the only factor related to pupillary contagion was socioeconomic status, with higher socioeconomic status predicting less pupillary contagion for emotionally-neutral stimuli. The results suggest that while pupillary contagion is a robust phenomenon, it can vary meaningfully across individuals. (shrink)

Why do children learn language more easily than adults do? This puzzle has fascinated cognitive and language scientists for decades. In the present letter, we approach the language learning puzzle from a cognitive perspective that is inspired by evidence from the perceptual and motor learning literature. Neuroscientific studies show that two memory systems in the brain are involved in human learning: an early implicit procedural memory system and a late-developing cognitive or declarative memory system. We argue that higher cognitive development (...) constrains implicit statistical learning processes that are essential for learning patterns and regularities in languages, that is, the adult cognitive architecture has a cost. This is supported by experimental evidence showing that acquisition of implicit linguistic knowledge is enhanced under cognitive depletion in adults. More research is needed to test the cognitive cost hypothesis as it could partly solve the language learning puzzle. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are: (1) to criticize the traditional conception of understanding in sociology; (2) to show how doing interpreting is achieved within the activity the participant is currently involved in; (3) to show how an individual's special characteristics, e.g., a "strange foreigner," are constructed and used within the actual trajectory of interaction; and (4) to demonstrate how the participants in the so-called intercultural communication 'do cultural differences' within interaction.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Unsaying Life Stories:The Self-Representational Art of Shirin Neshat and GhazelAphrodite Désirée Navab (bio)What connects the two artists in Figures 1 and 2 across time and place? (See pages 40 and 41.) The protagonists seem to be so "at home" in their landscape that they do not stand out as disruptions to a cultural rhythm. They are wearing clothing that symbolizes Iran, and they are in an environment that evokes (...) Iranian art and architecture. In Figure 1, a scene in Shirin Neshat's video Soliloquy (1999), a woman stands near the kind of dome one often sees in Islamic architecture; the compatibility of the curved and the straight lines is striking. The woman is washing herself, possibly in preparation for prayer. Her hands are artistically dyed with henna. Her eyes are closed as the water runs down her face. She seems to be unaware of the camera, involved in a private moment, a purification ritual perhaps. Her clothing, her hands, and the architectural background are all consistent with familiar images of the Middle East. The woman marching in a black chador in a video still by Ghazel (Figure 2) also seems to be quite "at home." The text underneath the image says that both her grandfathers were colonels. This "bothness" is repeated by the text written underneath the image, which appears both in English and in French. She marches to the right of the frame with the straight posture and hint of pants and boots characteristic of a soldier. Like the protagonist in Neshat's video, she neither looks at the camera nor seems to care that it is there. She seems to be re-enacting a private moment of family history.At least, this is what the images say at first glance. Upon closer inspection, the viewer learns that the two protagonists are the artists themselves. They are more than conscious of the camera; they have actually directed these visual narratives. They are posing. This is one role from among many that they could have played. Both artists are native to Iran, but they are [End Page 39] acting in their own productions. They are playing a particular role. They have made the directorial decisions about camera angle and distance, about the time and place, and about the final look of the production. They make images: they are fully aware that they have pictured themselves alongside symbols of Iran. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Shirin Neshat. Soliloquy, 1999, production still.So why are they pretending not to be conscious of the camera? The conscious decisions of the artists point to an issue that is left unsaid but whose absence says a lot. Perhaps, beneath all this effort to seem comfortable, there is discomfort as well. Are these people in fact "at home," or has home become foreign to them? Has this alienation propelled these artists to picture themselves together with readily identifiable, traditional markers of Iranian culture? Are these productions a way of re-negotiating their place with their native land, to find a voice, a space from which to speak?Culturally hybrid persons are often caught in the crossfire of prejudices. For hybrid Iranians, these prejudices are exacerbated by international political tensions that fall along three dimensions of limited visions. They include historical prejudice, where each nation dominates the other in the telling of history; cultural prejudice, stemming from mutual suspicion and ignorance; and political prejudice, as a result of inflexibility, of an unwillingness to [End Page 40] envision the other's view. Art can be a powerful means for challenging the stereotypes of mutually antagonistic nations. In autobiographical art, moreover, artists may use the "telling-self" to "unsay" what has been attributed to them through these stereotypes. By literally and metaphorically engaging the public in seeing alternative realities and histories, these artist-philosophers offer an alternative of historical collaboration, cultural knowledge, and political flexibility. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Ghazel, Me series, 1997–2000, video still.This deconstructive approach to representation is a significant feature of the camera-based work of two contemporary Iranian women artists: Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) and Ghazel (b. 1966... (shrink)

Thomas Elsaesser’s recent scholarship has examined the “mind-game film”, a phenomenon in Hollywood that is broadly characterised by multi-platform storytelling, paratextual narrative feedback loops, nonlinear storytelling, and unreliable character perspectives. While “mind-game” or “puzzle” films have become a contentious subject amongst post-cinema scholars concerned with Hollywood storytelling, what is to be said of contemporary European independent cinema? Elsaesser’s timely publication, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, examines an amalgam of politically inclined European auteurs to resolve this query. Elsaesser concedes that there (...) exists a phenomenological confluence between the mind-game film and contemporary European cinema. For instance, both produce characters afflicted by productive pathologies, designating new socially useful forms of agency and identity. One only needs to consult the amnesiac protagonist M (Markku Peltola) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002) or, as regards Lars von Trier’s cinema, Beth (Emily Watson) in Breaking the Waves (1996), Selma (Björk) in Dancer in the Dark (2000), “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Antichrist (2009) or Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Nymphomaniac (2013) to evince this overlap. However, this book is more concerned with performative self-contradictions, whereby cinema-as-enunciator is put under erasure, thus aggravating the inherent discrepancies troubling Europe today. Elsaesser, indeed, evaluates a growing general disaffection with politics, the rise of populist nationalism and far-right fringe parties, as well as an increasing population of economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. (shrink)